Gifrocket – elegant, simple and broken

While looking for a simple way to generate video to high-quality gifs (which are making a huge comeback, mostly thanks to mobile devices) my eye fell on Gifrocket, a simple Mac app.

The premise of Gifrocket is really simple. You install the app, open it and simply drag the video you want to convert to the app. The app then does it’s thing (which is “creating gifs”). In theory, this app is an elegant, easy to use piece of software. We were <—> this close to tell you to recommend it, but then “further testing” happens. You can see how Gifrocket works in the video below, but make sure to read the rest of this review as well.

The thing with Gifrocket is that it fails when your source file is even remotely “big”. We created a 20 second test video to convert into a gif, and the app simply couldn’t handle it.

the app crashed at least once

the app hung in the conversion process, not giving a sign of life

In one instance, we had to reboot our machine because it had frozen up

And, even when the app manages to generate the gif, the result was overwhelming. The quality isn’t very satisfying and the gif is basically broken. To top it off, the end result (the gif) ends up being bigger in file size than the movie we tried to convert. That made the conversion, done for “mobile users” pointless. Why make people load even more when they can just watch the video?

Gifrocket is still in beta, which might explain why it struggled during our tests. It’s hard to tell, because there’s no documentation on it’s official website. No explanation on what is and what isn’t supported. All we know is that, what could be a good tool in theory, ended up being slightly disappointed, and of no practical use. Maybe this will be changed in a next version of Gifrocket. Or perhaps something was wrong with our setup. But since there’s no way to find out about that, either, all we can do is write the review were planning to write (done) and archive it under “needs work”